One cool description of what we want is a happy life. But a happy life is different from a comfortable and pleasure-filled life.

In my mid-twenties, I tried to decide whether to marry Bonnie or Judy. I tried to take a God’s eye view, foreseeing what my life would be like with each wife. I predicted that life with Bonnie would be rocky, with big ups and downs, while life with Judy would be more placid and less exciting (little did I know!).

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Who is God? Adam and Eve hid in the bushes when they heard God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, embarrassed that he would see that they were naked. Moses talked with God face-to-face. Seeing him like that was so powerful that his face glowed for days. The writers of the first part of the Bible had no doubt that God was very much like you and me, liking and disliking, feeling anger and remorse, changing his mind about stuff.

It is a profound question whether God is a Person who acts in history. (more…)

Robert Louis Stevenson writes about Dr. Henry Jekyll, who finds a drug that makes his dark nature wholly dominant for short periods. During those times, he calls himself Mr. Hyde. You have a second person locked inside you that you seldom see. It’s the part of you who is enthusiastic about life all the time. It’s the part that chooses whatever will make your life better, effortlessly.

If there were a drug that made this side of you dominant, your life would take off in ways that you can hardly imagine. (more…)

If you know God, can you describe him?

Here’s an old joke that’s still pretty funny: An angel visits Charlie, and offers to answer any questions. Charlie says, “Well, I’d like to know what God is like”. The angel thinks a minute and says, “well, first of all, she’s black”. (Okay, it was funnier back in the ‘70’s.)

God, of course, is not black or female: he’s Jewish (as anyone knows who saw George Burns in “Oh, God”).

Now you’re too sophisticated to think of God as a woman or a man, right? (more…)

There is no better proving ground for taking control of your life than dieting: you test your motivation, your follow-through, your ability to produce success.

But if you want to lose weight, you’re going to have to quit dieting. Beverly loves to read a weekly magazine called “Women’s World”. You find it at the supermarket checkout stand, piling it on top of your ice cream and frozen French fries.

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In Something About Mary, Ben Stiller is advised to masturbate before his first date with the girl of his dreams (Cameron Diaz), to reduce his libido a little. He does so, right there on the big screen, with hair-raising results.

So what does God think about masturbation? (more…)

Where is the power in meditation? Hanging under the sign that read “Rejuvenation Center” was a bell. Larry rang it and a little old woman opened the door. “Hello”, Larry said. “I’ve been tired and cranky lately, and somebody recommended that I try you for a day.”

“You are welcome”, she smiled. (more…)

God is having a picnic for his angels, on the top of a lovely, rounded hill, white with snow. God sits cross-legged, looking remarkably like Mahatma Gandhi. He is engaged in small talk with the angels, when he spies Satan arriving, in a fire-engine red tuxedo with tails. Satan is the angel of Randomness — the good and bad things that happen to us by sheer chance.

“Yo, Satan!” God welcomes. “Wacha been doin’?” (more…)

Jonah hated Israel’s enemy, Ninevah, whose evil people deserved God’s vengeance. Instead, God told Jonah to go preach to them and to see if he could get them to change their ways. Indignant, Jonah refused and fled. God, in those days, was not to be fooled with. He got a big fish to swallow Jonah whole.

In primitive societies, God was a powerful, arbitrary being, and highly self-centered. We were worms, and he happily crushed us if we didn’t stay out of his way, or if we failed to appease him when he got angry. Anger was key.

As religion advanced, we came to see God as not at all arbitrary. He had specific, knowable rules, and all you had to do was to obey them. (more…)

Inner peace is of incomparable value. We experience it in various ways:

• the ability to stop the chatter in the back of your mind and be fully present
• a sense of being competent to deal with whatever might come up
• deep satisfaction with the way things are, no matter what.
• heightened awareness without stress. (more…)

Celestine Prophesies has magnified popular belief in the mystical roots of coincidences. In some ways, this belief traces back to the work of Carl Jung, and his fascination with what he called synchronicity.

Consider Jung’s striking example of a psychotherapy session. As the woman described dreaming about a golden scarab (an Egyptian beetle) a different sort of beetle, flying by outside, bumped into Jung’s window. He opened the window and it flew in.

Now, if that doesn’t prove that there are mystical forces, what does? (Just kidding.)

Coincidences always seem a little eerie. But maybe beetles flew into Jung’s window a thousand times over the forty years of his practice; he had just never noticed (or never opened his window). (more…)

Much of my career was in a company with operations in remote countries all over the world. Each manager was a kind of God, running his own empire, and feeling really independent and important.

The day came, of course, when the company instituted systems and rules that dramatically limited each manager’s authority. Predictably, the managers were furious, and many threatened to quit.

As it happened, a lot of thought went into these policies, and they produced big increases in safety, profitability and customer satisfaction.

But what amazed me was the reaction of the managers as the results began to accumulate. (more…)